Month: September 2012

I’ve asked my friends for help with the blog. I need some models that will endure my long sessions of photography, so I can practise and improve, and I can have shots as examples (I was told by an anonymous reader recently that my last post on shutters and diaphragms lacked pictures). Trouble is: I can do pictures of everyday stuff, like my pens, my books, or little flowers in my garden, but is that what you guys want to see as examples? Hey, if that’s the case, then by all means tell me, and I’ll get shooting! However, I think having some people around always help. Anyway, this weekend I’m taking the camera around and will play a bit so I can take many wonderful pictures to then use as (good or bad) examples in here! Also, I asked for help on portraits. I know that’s my weakest skill (one of the many weak ones I have) and I need to keep working on it as much as I can, but since I know …

Originally posted on Max Dunbar: The decision to revoke London Met’s ability to teach international students is a curious one. Closing down bogus colleges and visa mills is one thing. Deporting three thousand students is quite another. What was the rationale for this? A UKBA spokesman told the Guardian about ‘serious and systemic failings’ that meant that ‘Allowing London Metropolitan University to continue to sponsor and teach international students was not an option.’ Universities minister David Willetts said that ‘It is important that genuine students who are affected through no fault of their own are offered prompt advice and help.’ Defending the UKBA, conservative writer Ed West points out: ‘Student migration is now the largest route for non-European migrants to take, and has been so since 2008’. It appears that this is purely a numbers game. And I like Willetts’s emphasis on ‘genuine’ students. Again, people paying a visa mill is one thing. But are we now defining a ‘bogus’ student as someone who applies to a UK university with the intention of living in the UK,…

Today I had an interesting conversation with someone I appreciate, and whose opinion I hold in high esteem (I hope she doesn’t mind me mentioning her here). It started about work, and fears, and we digressed into what we like, what makes us tick. Well into the conversation, this person said something that resonates strongly within me, she said one sentence that I’ve used in the past, exactly the same words in exactly the same context… She said something was “killing her soul.” I think at that moment, I realised that even though we think we have massive problems, that nobody can understand us, that we’re the only ones facing certain ordeals, many people are like us, and we’re not alone in this. We think others, in different jobs, cities, countries, or even just different streets, might have similar problems, maybe; but we don’t realise that sometimes is the people closest to us, in location, the ones that actually we can relate to (and the most difficult to reach out to, I guess). I told …